About Me

Blog Archive

Search This Blog

Thursday, December 28, 2017

`All Is Not Dead'

Someone
asked if I missed Northern winters, and I do, though in my experience winter at
those latitudes is not one thing. Some years it means snow and cold and little
else. Other years it’s a cycle of freezes and thaws, beginning in October or
November and ending for good in May with the big thaw of summer, the season
that seems like an anomaly, a mere interruption of winter. The best thing about
the latter is the thaw that arrives late in January or early in February,
boosting the temperature into the forties or higher. It’s the thaw you can
smell. The earth in patches is bare again and the mineral scent of rot – death
turning into life – fills the woods. Skunk cabbage melts snow cover and sends
up twisted purple buds, a false harbinger of true spring.

Few think of
Philip Larkin as a nature poet, largely because he writes about human beings
and because he was no nature mystic. You’ll find no soft-headed, Emersonian, Mary
Oliver-style swooning in Larkin, but you will find frequent observations of the
natural world. Fifty-six years ago, in January 1962, he worked on an untitled sonnet
never published during his lifetime and posthumously titled “January” by
editors:

“A slight
relax of air where cold was

And water
trickles; dark ruinous light,

Scratched
like old film, above wet slates withdraws.

At
garden-ends, on railway banks, sad white

Shrinkage of
snow shows cleaner than the net

Stiffened
like ectoplasm in front windows.

“Shielded,
what sorts of life are stirring yet:

Legs lagged
like drains, slippers soft as fungus,

The gas and
grate, the old cold sour grey bed.

Some ajar
face, corpse-stubbled, bends round

To see the
sky over the aerials—

Sky, absent
paleness across which the gulls

Wing to the
Corporation rubbish ground.

A slight
relax of air. All is not dead.”

Larkin
refers to the nameless season called by Eliot “midwinter spring.” In Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love (2014),
James Booth describes the poem’s setting as “an urban wasteland [in which] a
decrepit figure reminiscent of a Samuel Beckett character turns towards the
faintest hint of spring.” One looks for hope in Larkin (it's there, though unadvertised) as one awaits warmth and blues skies.